Partial List of Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
6/4/12 Matthew Kluger, lawyer, sentenced to 12 years in prison, along with co-conspirator stock trader Garrett Bauer (9 years) and co-conspirator Kenneth Robinson (not yet sentenced) for 17 year insider trading scheme.
6/14/12 Allen Stanford sentenced to 110 years without parole.
6/15/12 Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs director, found guilty of insider trading. Could face a decade in prison when sentenced later this year.
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
6/22/12 James F. Cochran, 56, former chairman of the board of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and six counts of wire fraud.
6/22/12 Rick D. Snow, 48, former CFO of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud.
7/13/12 Russell Wassendorf Sr., CEO of collapsed brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc. arrested and charged with lying to regulators after admitting to authorities he embezzled "millions of dollars" and forged bank statements for "nearly twenty years."
8/22/12 Doug Whitman, Whitman Capital LLC hedge fund founder, convicted of insider trading following a trial in which he spent more than two days on the stand telling jurors he was innocent
10/26/12 UPDATE: Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta sentenced to two years in federal prison. He will, of course, appeal. . .
11/20/12 Hedge fund manager Matthew Martoma charged with insider trading at SAC Capital Advisors, and prosecutors are looking at Martoma's boss, Steven Cohen, for possible involvement.

This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.

Trading was halted in index derivatives on the Stockholm Stock Exchange today (11/28) after a monster futures order valued at around $69 trillion appeared in the system, according to Swedish business newspaper SvD Näringsliv.

The "trade" was a buy order for nearly 4.3 billion OMXS30 warrants (valued at nearly 460 trillion kronor), an amount over 131 times Sweden's GDP. The OMXS30 is the exchange's flagship stock index, and the error apparently caused enough problems to force a closure of the market.

A report in Investment Europe said that despite safeguards, "somehow the order made its way into the order book, causing chaos for traders."

SvD Näringsliv's Gustaf Palm reports (via Google Translate):

According to the Exchange spokesman Carl Norell has no order of that size team into the system. Instead, it is about a parsing incurred in exchange system due to a technical error. The order, Norell writes in an email, anullerades, but still remains a problem why the index derivatives market is closed since just before 10 am this morning.

At 15 pages, the new letter is much shorter than the 325-page original, but it still packs a heavy punch, and it arrives at exactly the right time: just as the SEC and other regulatory agencies are trying to work out how the Volcker Rule should look, especially in the wake of the JP Morgan London Whale fiasco. (All of which was, embarrassingly, entirely Volcker-compliant.) Meanwhile, the Occupy Bank Working Group, which got a flurry of publicity back in March, is still going strong, working on something which has the potential to be much more far-reaching than any letter. It takes time to build a new kind of bank, which is their ultimate ambition, and they’re not there yet. But they’re moving in that direction, and if Andrew Ross Sorkin had talked to any of them before filing his column today, he might not have been so dismissive with respect to the legacy of Occupy. (“It will be an asterisk in the history books, if it gets a mention at all.”)

In fact, Occupy was hugely important: it provided an overarching frame, and context, which could then be applied in a myriad of different situations and geographies. When Mitt Romney dismisses 47% of America as “victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them”, it’s impossible not to think of Occupy, the self-described 99%, and the fact that it was emphatically not a call for government handouts. In reality, it was much closer to a call for a genuine equality of opportunity — something that Romney should be supporting, rather than opposing.

But Sorkin isn’t interested in the effects that Occupy has had on political discourse, or even on regulatory rule-making. He’s looking for some very narrow things indeed:

Has the debate over breaking up the banks that were too big to fail, save for a change of heart by the former chairman of Citigroup, Sanford I. Weill, really changed or picked up steam as a result of Occupy Wall Street? No. Have any new regulations for banks or businesses been enacted as a result of Occupy Wall Street? No. Has there been any new meaningful push to put Wall Street executives behind bars as a result of Occupy Wall Street? No.

And even on the issues of economic inequality and upward mobility — perhaps Occupy Wall Street’s strongest themes — has the movement changed the debate over executive compensation or education reform? It is not even a close call.

Actually, I think that Occupy the SEC did change the debate over breaking up the banks. Certainly its letter was very widely read in Washington, where Congressional staffers are constantly inundated with lobbyists’ position papers but see very little from, well, the 99%. But more generally, Occupy was clearly opposed to the entire Washington system, and so it’s rather silly to point to the fact that the Washington system hasn’t done much in the past year, and use that as evidence that Occupy was a dud.

Speaking personally, I find it impossible to read the unemployment numbers on the first Friday of every month without thinking about the protestors at Occupy; if nothing else, they did a fantastic job at putting a face on otherwise dry statistics. But what Occupy has really given us is something much more important than that. It’s a new way of looking at the world we live in — a viewpoint characterized by equality and respect for all, combined with an unapologetic anger at where we’re at. That’s a viewpoint it’s pretty much impossible to find on Wall Street, or among Andrew Ross Sorkin’s sources. But it’s also a viewpoint held by millions of people around the country and the world. It’s probably too much to hope that Sorkin might start taking it seriously at some point.

4. SEPTEMBER A Rare Look at Why the Government Won't Fight Wall Street MATT TAIBBI

The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who've come at the issue from the inside.

We get one of those rare inside accounts in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, a new book by Jeff Connaughton, the former aide to Senators Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden. Jeff is well known to reporters like me; during a period when most government officials double-talked or downplayed the Wall Street corruption problem, Jeff was one of the few voices on the Hill who always talked about the subject with appropriate alarm. He shared this quality with his boss Kaufman, the Delaware Senator who took over Biden's seat and instantly became an irritating (to Wall Street) political force by announcing he wasn’t going to run for re-election. "I later learned from reporters that Wall Street was frustrated that they couldn’t find a way to harness Ted or pull in his reins," Jeff writes. "There was no obvious way to pressure Ted because he wasn’t running for re-election." Kaufman for some time was a go-to guy in the Senate for reform activists and reporters who wanted to find out what was really going on with corruption issues. He was a leader in a number of areas, attempting to push through (often simple) fixes to issues like high-frequency trading (his advocacy here looked prescient after the "flash crash" of 2010), naked short-selling, and, perhaps most importantly, the Too-Big-To-Fail issue. What’s fascinating about Connaughton’s book is that we now get to hear a behind-the-scenes account of who exactly was knocking down simple reform ideas, how they were knocked down, and in some cases we even find out why good ideas were rejected, although some element of mystery certainly remains here.

There are some damning revelations in this book, and overall it’s not a flattering portrait of key Obama administration officials like SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami, Department of Justice honchos Eric Holder (who once worked at the same law firm, Covington and Burling, as Connaughton) and Lanny Breuer, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Most damningly, Connaughton writes about something he calls "The Blob," a kind of catchall term describing an oozy pile of Hill insiders who are all incestuously interconnected, sometimes by financial or political ties, sometimes by marriage, sometimes by all three. And what Connaughton and Kaufman found is that taking on Wall Street even with the aim of imposing simple, logical fixes often inspired immediate hostile responses from The Blob; you’d never know where it was coming from. In one amazing example described in the book, Kaufman decided he wanted to try to re-instate the so-called "uptick rule," which had existed for seventy years before being rescinded by the SEC in 2007. The rule prevents investors from shorting a stock until the stock had ticked up in price. "Forcing short sellers to wait for the price to tick up before they sell more shares gives a breather to a stock in decline and helps prevent bear raids," Connaughton writes. The uptick rule is controversial on Wall Street – I’ve had some people literally scream at me that it doesn’t do anything, while others have told me that it does help prevent bear attacks of the sort that appeared to help finally topple already-mortally-wounded companies like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers – but what’s inarguable is that Wall Street hates the rule. Hedge fund types or employees of really any company that engages in short-selling will tend to be most venomous in their opinions of the uptick rule.

Anyway, Connaughton and Kaufman were under the impression that new SEC chief Mary Schapiro would re-instate the uptick rule after taking office. When she didn’t, Kaufman wrote her a letter, asking her to take action. When that didn't do the trick, he co-sponsored (with Republican Johnny Isakson) a bill that would have required the SEC to take action. Nothing happened, and months later, Kaufman gave a grumbling interview to Politico about the issue. One June 30, the paper’s headline read: "Ted Kaufman to SEC; Do Your Job." The next day, the Blob bit back. Connaughton was in the basement of the Russell building when a Senate staffer whose wife worked for Shapiro shouted at him. From the book:

"Hey, Jeff, you’re in the doghouse." He meant: with his wife.

"Why?" I asked.

"That Politico piece by your boss."

I was taken aback but tried to downplay the matter. "We just want the SEC to get its work done."

"Remember," he said. "We all wear blue jerseys and play for the Blue Team. I just don’t think that helps."

When Connaughton told Kaufman over the phone what the staffer said, Kaufman exploded. "You call him back right now and tell him I said to go fuck himself in his ear," Kaufman said. Similarly, when Kaufman tried to advocate for rules that would have prevented naked short-selling, Connaughton was warned by a lobbyist that it would be "bad for my career" if he went after the issue and that "Ted and I looked like deranged conspiracy theorists" for asking if naked short-selling had played a role in the final collapse of Lehman Brothers. Naked short-selling is another controversial practice. Essentially, when you short a stock, you're supposed to locate shares of that stock before you go out and sell it short. But what hedge funds and banks have discovered is that the rules provide "leeway" – you can go out and sell shares in a stock without actually having it, provided you have a "reasonable belief" that you can locate the shares. This leads to the obvious possibility of companies creating false supply in a stock by selling shares they don't have. Without getting too much into the weeds here, there is an obvious solution to the problem, which essentially would be forcing companies to actually locate shares before selling them. In their attempt to change the system, Kaufman and Connaughton discovered that the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation, the massive quasi-private organization that clears most all stock trades in America, had come up with just such a fix on their own. Kaufman recruited some other senators to endorse the idea, and as late as 2009, Connaughton and Kaufman were convinced they were going to get the form. "I said to Ted, 'We’re going to change the way stocks are traded in this country.'" But before the change could be made, Goldman, Sachs issued "data" showing that there was "no correlation" between naked short selling and price movements. When Connaughton asked an Isakson staffer what the data said, the staffer, intimidated by Goldman, replied, "The data proves we're full of shit." Connaughton looked at the data and realized instantly that it was a bunch of irrelevant gobbledygook, even firing off an angry letter to Goldman telling them the tactic was beneath even them. But Goldman’s tactic worked. A roundtable to discuss the idea was scheduled by the SEC on September 24, 2009. Of the nine invited participants, "all but one" were for the status quo. Connaughton expected the DTCC representatives to unveil their reform idea, but they didn’t:

Afterwards, I went over to and asked, "What happened?" Sheepishly, and to their credit, they admitted: "We got pulled back." They meant: by their board, by the Wall Street powers-that-be.

...On the outside we can only deduce the mindset from actions and non-actions, but Connaughton’s actually seen it, and with the book you get to see it too. It’s scary and definitely worth a read.

6. I asked this question over in GD. (I know never stick your hand in the crazy) but,

A coworker says that union utility workers in NY are running off non-union utility workers that have come in from out of state to help with repairs after the storm. Any truth to that story? What have you folks heard?

41. Thank you. Have a good day. nt

51. Texas is a right to work state....

And Rick Perry is a Texas sized asshole, but I can tell you straight up that when Houston went through Hurricane Ike, we didn't turn down any utility workers that came down to help. Of course we are very blue here. They worked miracles in Houston.

10. Rising Tower Emerges as a Billionaires’ Haven

One57, a 1,004-foot tower under construction in Midtown Manhattan, will soon hold the title of New York’s tallest building with residences. But without fanfare from its ultraprivate future residents, it is cementing a new title: the global billionaires’ club. The buyers of the nine full-floor apartments near the top that have sold so far — among them two duplexes under contract for more than $90 million each — are all billionaires, Gary Barnett, the president of the Extell Development Company, the building’s developer, said this week. The other seven apartments ranged in price from $45 million to $50 million.

The billionaires’ club includes several Americans, at least two buyers from China, a Canadian, a Nigerian and a Briton, according to Mr. Barnett and brokers who have sold apartments in the building, at 157 West 57th Street. Mr. Barnett said that at least a few buyers were “significant Forbes billionaires.” Since late last year, the “trophy” end of New York’s real estate market has been recording eye-popping sales that seem to have little basis in reality. The signed contract for the nearly-11,000-square-foot duplex on the 89th and 90th floors of One57 that sold for about $95 million topped the record sale in March of a penthouse at 15 Central Park West to a Russian billionaire’s daughter for $88 million. In June, Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino magnate, paid $70 million for a duplex penthouse apartment above the Ritz-Carlton. Individual sales aside, it is the sheer concentration of wealth in One57, a $1.5 billion development, that is raising the eyebrows of some longtime market watchers.

“The scale of wealth in this building is just unheard of,” said Jonathan J. Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a property appraiser. “Despite all the problems economically, you are seeing these people invest in real estate unlike in any period that has ever happened.”

Since sales began in the building in November, Extell has signed contracts for more than $1 billion worth of apartments, about $300 million just this summer, Mr. Barnett said. Fewer than 40 of the 92 apartments remain unsold, among them four full-floor units. But Mr. Barnett said two potential buyers from China were “circling” one of them. The cost of entry into the club now exceeds $50 million for the remaining full-floor apartments, Mr. Barnett said. Last week, after Extell provided a reporter with an exclusive look at the 360-degree views that the owners of the full-floor apartments will experience when they are able to move in late next year, it was not hard to understand the appeal of One57.

The construction elevator took six minutes to ascend 850 feet to an apartment on the 85th floor. (It will take 30 seconds for the residents’ three elevators to reach the top, Extell officials said.) The 6,240-square-foot apartment was bought by an American who already owned “some of the best real estate in the world,” including two “very significant” places in New York, said Nikki Field, the Sotheby’s International Realty broker who represented the buyer. For now, the apartment is just bare walls and concrete. Orange netting hangs in place of what will be floor-to-ceiling windows. The building seems almost centered along the south end of Central Park. From the apartment’s main living room, the park seems to roll out like a giant green carpet. On a clear day, you can see all the way to the Bronx. To the east, planes can be seen taking off from La Guardia and Kennedy Airports. The Atlantic Ocean pokes out over the horizon. To the northwest, the gentle bend in the Hudson River is visible. Closer in, you can see the grassy terrace of the $88 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West. To the south, a resident standing in what will be a bathroom with his-and-hers showers and toilets will look out on the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center complex and the Statue of Liberty, not to mention the electronic billboards in Times Square.

“A lot of what is happening at One57 is about wealth preservation”

I DUNNO, FOLKS. SEEMS LIKE PUTTING AN ADDRESS OUT THERE IS JUST GOOD FOR THE TUMBRILS...

Reader Deontos highlighted a post on Reuters by two Brooklyn Law School professors, Bradley Borden and David Reiss, on a subject near and dear to our hearts, the abject failure of the IRS to take interest in widespread, probably pervasive, violations of REMIC, the part of the Federal tax code that governs mortgage securitizations.

The reason this matters is that this situation belies on of the Administration’s pet claims, that its hands were tied as far as addressing the foreclosure mess was concerned because it had no leverage over servicers. As we’ll discuss, in fact the Administration has a nuclear weapon in its hands that it is simply refusing to use.

The reason the Borden and Reiss piece is noteworthy is it’s the first time I’m aware of that experts have chosen to comment at length on the REMIC issue, suggest that there is likely a BIG problem here, and politely point out that the REMICs may have committed fraud, which would allow the statute of limitations to remain open indefinitely, giving the IRS plenty of time to investigate and litigate.

However, I suspect the professors have heard that the IRS is choosing to do nothing, as their quote of Lee Sheppard at the top of their piece suggests:

They take aggressive positions, and they figure that if enough of them take an aggressive position, and there’s billions of dollars at stake, then the IRS is kind of estopped from arguing with them because so much would blow up. And that is called the Wall Street Rule. That is literally the nickname for it.

We suspect they know full well the Wall Street Rule is being applied here...

Q: How has the financial system evolved into the form of economic servitude that you call “debt peonage” in your book, implying a negation of democracy as well as free-market capitalism as classically understood?

A: The original hope of banking and finance capitalism in the 19th century was that banks would make productive loans to finance industry. The aim was for banks to do something new, that no economy had done in the past: make loans not merely to ship and market goods once they were produced, but to finance new capital investment by manufacturers and producers, as well as by the public sector to build infrastructure. The idea was for these investments to create profits out of which to pay the interest and the principal back to the lenders.

This was defined as productive lending. Nothing like it occurred in antiquity or in the post-feudal period. Investment always had been self-financed out of savings. Banks only entered the picture when it came to shipping and trading what had been produced.

As matters have turned out, banking has allied itself with real estate, mineral extraction, oil, gas and monopolies instead of with industry. So instead of getting a share of the profits, it has focused on lending against economic rent. This technical term is defined as unearned income. It is obtained by charging prices in excess of cost value. Economic rent has no counterpart in the cost of putting means of production in place. And land has no cost; it is provided by nature. The only “cost” is the price of buying the right to charge rent on it. This economic rent is created by special legal privilege or ownership rights to install tollbooths on roads, education systems and other basic needs. Owners aim to charge as they can, without regard for how this affects overall growth and balance.

Banks have the privilege of creating credit and charging for access to it. Most bank credit is extended to buy property or rent-seeking privileges already in place. Banks rarely are set up to evaluate new capital investment. Their time frame is notoriously short-term. It takes time to develop production facilities, mount a sales campaign and develop markets for new goods. It is easier simply to buy a privilege to extract charges without producing anything at all. This is what property rights are, along with special privileges such as charging interest without making a tangible investment. So banks back the kind of economy that makes money without new capital investment. The easiest way to do this is to make loans for real estate at increasingly debt-leveraged, bank-inflated prices. They call this a post-industrial “service” economy. It is simply a rentier tollbooth economy.

Classical economists from the Physiocrats down through the Progressive Era a century ago explained why land rent, subsoil natural resource rent and monopoly rent should have been the source of tax for cities, states and nations. That is the essence of classical economics. But instead of supporting productive industry by extending credit to increase tangible capital investment, the banking system has extended credit mainly (about 80 percent in the United States and most English-speaking countries) to buy real estate and load it down with debt. The result is that rental income is used to pay interest to the banks rather than to pay taxes. This forces governments to tax wages, profits and sales. That increases the cost of living and doing business, on top of the interest charge...MORE--IMPORTANT!

13. THE CLINCHER

This is the basic problem with the Anglo-American-Dutch banking system. Instead of extending loans to create new factories to employ people, new means of production, bankers look at what can be pledged as collateral on which they can foreclose.

14. Euro zone joblessness hits record, inflation eases

Euro zone joblessness has reached a new high and the poor state of the economy is reducing inflation to near two-year lows, raising the prospect of further interest cuts by the European Central Bank.

As the euro zone sinks into its second recession since 2009, the number of people out of work in the euro zone rose by 173,000 people in October to almost 19 million people unemployed, the EU's statistics office Eurostat said on Friday. That pushed joblessness to the highest level since the euro was introduced in 1999, at 11.7 percent of the working population, illustrating the human impact of a public debt and banking crisis that has reverberated across the world.

Struggling companies and indebted households have also lost the confidence to spend and invest, evident in the annual consumer price inflation reading for November, which dropped to 2.2 percent in November from 2.5 percent in October. Consumer price inflation was at its lowest level since December 2010. One of the smallest rises in energy price inflation in a year helped to bring inflation to near the ECB's target of near, but just under 2 percent, opening the door to more rate cuts by the bank...

15. Tipping the Scales in Housing Court

IT’S easy to tell who’s going to win in eviction court. On one side of the room sit the tenants: men in work uniforms, mothers with children in secondhand coats, confused and crowded together on hard benches. On the other side, often in a set-aside space, are not the landlords but their lawyers: dark suits doing crossword puzzles and joking with the bailiff as they casually wait for their cases to be called.

Millions of Americans face eviction every year. But legal aid to the poor, steadily starved since the Reagan years, has been decimated during the recession. The result? In many housing courts around the country, 90 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys and 90 percent of tenants are not. This imbalance of power is as unfair as the solution is clear. When tenants have lawyers, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically. Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court is a cost-effective social policy that would prevent homelessness and uphold our ideals of fundamental fairness. Poor people cannot afford lawyers, and in nearly all civil cases they don’t have a right to one. In the 1963 landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court unanimously established the right to counsel for indigent defendants in criminal cases on the grounds that a fair trial was virtually impossible without a lawyer. Eighteen years later, the court heard the case of Abby Gail Lassiter, a poor black woman from North Carolina who appeared without counsel at a civil trial that resulted in her parental rights being erased. This time, a divided Supreme Court ruled that the right to appointed counsel was reserved for indigent litigants only when the loss of physical liberty was at stake.

Incarceration is a misery, but the outcomes of civil cases, as Ms. Lassiter learned, can be devastating, with stubbornly resilient consequences. Consider eviction’s fallout. Families forced from their homes often lose their possessions, too: furniture and clothes piled on the sidewalk or auctioned off by moving companies. Evicted families experience long stretches of homelessness, with kids bouncing between shelters or abandoned houses. Sociological research affirms what anyone who teaches poor children knows: that residential instability is the enemy of school success. Evicted families end up in bad housing in bad neighborhoods because most landlords turn them away. Months and even years after being evicted, people experience more material hardship and higher levels of depression than peers who avoided eviction. Psychologists have identified eviction as a risk factor for suicide.

Our legal system extends the right to a state-appointed attorney to someone facing months or years of prison but not to someone facing months or years of homelessness. In recent years, the poor have watched their incomes flat-line or drop, while housing costs have soared and federal spending on low-income housing assistance has plummeted. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only one in four families who qualify for housing assistance get it. The rest devote huge chunks of their income — sometimes 80 or 90 percent — to rent. For these families, missing a rent payment is less the result of irresponsibility than of inevitability...

16. Class Wars of 2012 By PAUL KRUGMAN

On Election Day, The Boston Globe reported, Logan International Airport in Boston was running short of parking spaces. Not for cars — for private jets. Big donors were flooding into the city to attend Mitt Romney’s victory party. They were, it turned out, misinformed about political reality. But the disappointed plutocrats weren’t wrong about who was on their side. This was very much an election pitting the interests of the very rich against those of the middle class and the poor.

And the Obama campaign won largely by disregarding the warnings of squeamish “centrists” and embracing that reality, stressing the class-war aspect of the confrontation. This ensured not only that President Obama won by huge margins among lower-income voters, but that those voters turned out in large numbers, sealing his victory The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t. The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election.

...Democrats seem to have neutralized the traditional G.O.P. advantage on social issues, so that the election really was a referendum on economic policy. And what voters said, clearly, was no to tax cuts for the rich, no to benefit cuts for the middle class and the poor. So what’s a top-down class warrior to do? The answer, as I have already suggested, is to rely on stealth — to smuggle in plutocrat-friendly policies under the pretense that they’re just sensible responses to the budget deficit.

Consider, as a prime example, the push to raise the retirement age, the age of eligibility for Medicare, or both. This is only reasonable, we’re told — after all, life expectancy has risen, so shouldn’t we all retire later? In reality, however, it would be a hugely regressive policy change, imposing severe burdens on lower- and middle-income Americans while barely affecting the wealthy. Why? First of all, the increase in life expectancy is concentrated among the affluent; why should janitors have to retire later because lawyers are living longer? Second, both Social Security and Medicare are much more important, relative to income, to less-affluent Americans, so delaying their availability would be a far more severe hit to ordinary families than to the top 1 percent...

24. The Right-Wing Media Bubble Cocoons Republicans from Adapting to the New Political Landscape

Republicans are responding to their recent losses not by moderating their rhetoric or rethinking their policy preferences, but by retreating deeper into the conservative bubble -- and hardening it lest any objective reality intrude.

In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn approached the idea that villifying half the country as lazy “takers” dependent on the largesse of the makers may not be a way to win over the masses. He wrote, “Maybe Americans who have reason to feel insecure about their futures don't find a government that promises to be there for them when they need it all that menacing.” But he then rejects the notion and calls for better propaganda. “Conservatives' top priority,” he writes, “should be promoting an alternative—that in a highly competitive, global economy, the only real economic security for ordinary Americans is the security of opportunity.”

Victor Davis Hanson's analysis of the election was representative and equally informative. He wrote that Mitt Romney was an amazing candidate – “a glittering Sir Galahad who, given his impressive horse, armor, and lance, along with his decency and piety, assumed that he could win a joust in a fair charge against the other team’s knight.” Hanson claimed that 47 percent of the population are in fact dependent on government and mocked the idea that the Republican Party might try to reach out to non-white voters. “The only way Republicans can appeal to Latinos,” he wrote, is to “close the border, stop illegal immigration, and allow the melting pot and upward mobility to fracture 'Hispanics' along class lines.”

For Hanson and most of his readers, neither the message nor the messenger were problematic; only the pernicious bias of the traditional media prevented voters from embracing the plans Mitt Romney was going to detail right after his victory. Hanson then, without irony, warned his fellow Republicans of the dangers of falling into the comforting “cocoon” provided by the conservative media...

19. Student loan delinquencies hit new high

Late last year, total student debt outstanding surpassed $1 trillion for the first time. Now, the problem of student loan delinquency is generating its own eye-popping numbers.

New data released today shows 11% of student loans were 90 days or more past due in the third quarter, up from 8.9% in the previous quarter and 8.8% a year prior, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It’s also the highest since at least 2003, when the bank first started tracking student loan delinquencies. “It’s a red flag and a warning sign that more Americans are struggling to repay their student loans — things are bad, really bad, and getting worse,” says Rich Williams, higher-education advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit based in Washington.

The latest data comes at a time when delinquencies on many other consumer debts, including credit cards and mortgages, are dropping. Overall, delinquency rates on outstanding consumer debt fell to 8.9% in the third quarter, from 10% a year prior, according to the FRBNY.

And the rise in student-loan delinquencies could be far from over. The FRBNY’s calculation counts borrowers who are in deferment or forbearance — periods during which they can put off payments without penalty — as being current on their loans. But there’s no telling whether these borrowers will be able to keep up with payments once these temporary relief periods are over. More than 1.5 million federal student loan borrowers were in economic-hardship deferment (which is granted for hardships like unemployment) and in forbearance (which borrowers can apply for if they can’t afford to repay this debt based on their current income) at the end of September 2009, up 26% from a year prior, according to the latest data from FinAid.org, which tracks student loan debt. That number could be higher now given the high unemployment rates that have persisted since then.

To be sure, some experts say student-loan debt is still nowhere near becoming a real economic crisis. That would require the two-year default rate on federal student loans, which was 9.1% at the end of September 2011, to triple, says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org...

AND THEY'D HAVE TO SNATCH ALL THOSE SECURITY BLANKETS AWAY FROM THE "EXPERTS"...

48. OOPS! That FACT, not Fat

21. Strauss-Kahn, NY maid settle assault case for '$6 million'

11/30/12 Strauss-Kahn, NY maid settle assault case for '$6 million'
Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nafissitou Diallo, the New York hotel maid who accused him of sexually assaulting her last year, will settle out of court for $6 million, French media reports said on Friday.

Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has reportedly settled out of court with the woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a luxury New York City hotel last May. French media reported on Friday that the two will settle for $6 million (4.6 million euros), an agreement that would end the 18-month-long saga that brought down one of France's most prominent political figures.

Strauss-Kahn was tipped to win this year's French presidential election before being handcuffed by New York City police in May 2011. He reached the deal with Nafissitou Diallo, a former Sofitel hotel maid, within recent days, the New York Times and NBC television first revealed on Thursday.

The Associated Press said that a court date between the two parties had been set for sometime next week. All of the news outlets that reported the settlement quoted unidentified sources.

45. Attorneys for Strauss-Kahn deny settlement reached

Attorneys for Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Friday denied that the former International Monetary Fund chief has reached a settlement with a New York City hotel maid who accused him of trying to rape her.

William Taylor III and Amit Mehta said in a statement issued Friday that the parties have merely "discussed a resolution."

A person familiar with the case told The Associated Press on Thursday that a settlement had been reached. The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the private negotiation.

"Media reports that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has agreed to pay $6 million to settle the civil case are flatly false," the attorneys said. "The parties have discussed a resolution but there has been no settlement. Mr. Strauss-Kahn will continue to defend the charges if no resolution can be reached."

French newspaper Le Monde, citing people close to Strauss-Kahn, reported the $6 million figure.

Strauss-Kahn's Paris lawyers, Frederique Baulieu, Richard Malka and Henri Leclerc, said they "vigorously deny the fantasist and erroneous information" published by Le Monde.

22. As Rumors of 'Grand Bargain' Cuts to Medicare Swirl, Progressives in Congress Say No Way

In a story already making waves across Washington, Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen reported this morning that a bipartisan “grand bargain” is emerging from talks between the White House and Republicans. The contours of the deal are this: About $1.2 trillion in new tax revenue, mostly likely from an rate increase on income over $250,000, along with at least $400 billion over 10 years in entitlement cuts “and perhaps a lot more,” mostly from Medicare.

Liberals have drawn a hardline against entitlement cuts and $400 billion is a lot of money, so some progressives are not pleased with the idea. Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the chairman of the 77-member Progressive Caucus, told Salon that his members would not support entitlement cuts. “Any agreement to meet our end-of-the-year deadlines will need a large portion of the House Democratic Caucus to pass. Progressives will not support any deal that cuts benefits for families and seniors who rely on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to put food on the table or cover their health costs,” he said.

Outside groups took an even tougher line.

“If this report in Politico is correct, then some ‘senior Democrats’ are sorely misguided about where their base stands. So let me be crystal clear. Any benefit cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, including raising the retirement or eligibility age, are absolutely unacceptable,” Ilya Sheyman, the campaign director at MoveOn.org told Salon. “More than 80 percent of MoveOn’s seven million members say they want us to fight a deal that cuts those benefits, even if it also ends all of the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent. And that’s a mainstream position everywhere except in the lobbyist-cash-infused DC cocktail circuit,” Sheyman continued...

27. Why Even a Deal on the Budget Is Bad for the American Economy

Outcomes range from slowdown to outright recession. And it's all totally unnecessary...Looking at the latest US data, business sentiment and capital spending have been eroding, and given the lagged impact of capital expenditure, that trend looks set to continue for the next few months. Against that, a number of consumer sentiment indicators remain upbeat and housing looks like it is in a firmly established uptrend, after a 5 year bear market. In fact, the existing home inventory to sales ratio is as low as it ever gets, and that is with still very depressed sales. If sales pick up further, given low inventories and with new housing starts still below the replacement rate, home prices could lurch forward.

That said, the markets have been fairly upbeat given the rising perception of a deal to avert the US falling off the ‘fiscal cliff’. But even a deal that drains, say, 1-1.5% of GDP will have negative consequences for the US economy. Bear in mind that the U.S. still has a very high ratio of private debt to GDP. Therefore any such fiscal restriction as contemplated by the two parties may result in a significantly lower economic growth rate than the average 3% rate of the last five quarters (which is what the revised economic data of the past few quarters will eventually show).

Of course, if there is no compromise, the impact could be calamitous. The IMF projects as much as a 4% decline in GDP if there is a full fiscal cliff. In 1936-37 there was a fiscal cliff of almost 6% of GDP. It was followed by a 36% non annualized decline in industrial production in a mere eight months in late 1937/early 1938. More recently, all of the European countries fiscal restriction has had a more negative impact on GDP than had initially been forecast.

So the range of likely outcomes ranges from slowdown to outright recession and the silly thing is that it is all so unnecessary. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid impose no real burdens, even with a rising proportion of ageing baby boomers. In fact, one could plausibly make the case that an aging society could help to generate favorable conditions for achieving sustained high employment with high productivity growth. As the number of aged rises relative to the number of potential workers, what is required is to put unemployed labor to work to produce output needed by seniors. Providing social security benefits to retirees will generate the necessary effective demand to direct labor to producing this output. Just as rapid growth of effective demand during the Clinton boom allowed sustained growth of the employment rate, even as productivity growth rose nearer to United States long-term historical averages, tomorrow’s retirees can provide the necessary demand to allow the United States to operate near to full employment with rising labor productivity—a “virtuous combination” of the high productivity growth model followed by Europe and Japan from 1970–95 and the high employment model followed by the United States during the 1960s, as well as during the Clinton boom. Here’s what most members of Congress (and, indeed, the media and the public) fail to appreciate: Policy formation must distinguish between financial provisioning and real provisioning for the future; only the latter can prepare society as a whole for coming challenges. While individuals can, and should, save financial assets for their individual retirements, society cannot prepare for waves of future retirees by accumulating financial trust funds. Rather, society prepares for aging by investing to increase future real productivity. Unfortunately, no such discussions are taking place, which is likely to lead to a bad to horrific policy outcome.

28. Eurozone unemployment rate hits another record high of 11.7 percent in October

Armando Franca/Associated Press - Dockworkers arrive outside the Portuguese parliament in Lisbon Thursday, Nov. 29 2012, during a protest by several European dockworkers unions. In the parliament lawmakers were debating a new law that the worker’s claim will lead to the loss of jobs.

LONDON — Another month, another record unemployment rate for the economy of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro.

Figures released Friday by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, showed that the recession in the eurozone pushed unemployment in the currency bloc up to 11.7 percent in October, a new record since the introduction of the euro in 1999.

The rise from the previous record of 11.6 percent in September was anticipated after the eurozone returned to recession in the third quarter, commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

While the eurozone’s unemployment has been inching upward since June 2011, the equivalent rate in the U.S. has fallen to below 8 percent as the world’s largest economy continues its recovery from recession. In October, it stood at 7.9 percent

32. Sen. Sanders: Wall Street CEOs are the 'Faces of Class Warfare'

Incredulous that Wall Street investment bankers and billionaire CEOs have descended on Washington in the midst of ongoing budget talks to tell Americans that they should "lower their expectations" when it comes to the security of their retirement and future health care, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday to call out the audacity of corporate-minded millionaires and billionaires, calling them the new "face of class warfare" in the United States.

"I find it literally beyond comprehension, that we have folks from Wall Street who received huge bailouts from the people of our country—from working families in this country—because of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior, which Wall Street did to drive us into this recession, and now these very same people are coming here to Congress to lecture us and the American people about how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while they enjoy huge salaries and retirement benefits."

Sanders specifically called out CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, who has recently been making both the media rounds and consulting with lawmakers regarding the ongoing tax and budget debate in Washington during the current lame duck session. Blankfein, one of the highest paid executives on Wall Street and worth hundred of millions personally, made the comments about 'lowered expectations' in a recent evening news interview with CBS and said that average Americans should understand that the US simply can't "afford" to maintain programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The facts of such sentiments, as many economists repeatedly point out, are false, but Sanders said that Blankfein delivered the familiar rightwing trope "with all the sympathy for someone struggling to get by on $14,000-a-year retirement that you’d expect from a Wall Street banker paid $16 million last year."

53. Time to ...

55. Tumbrills, French razor, I can only dream. We can't do it with the small numbers of us

here in SMW and the folks in OWS. Will not happen until more people feel the pain of this depression. A part of me wished the Mitt would have won then the pain would come. We can pack 50-60 thousnd people in a football stadium and a 100 thousand at a NASCAR race Sunday after Sunday yet we can't get more than a few 100 at best into the streets. The folks on DU the largest progressive website in the world doesn't have the stones to organize or take to the streets. Bring up mass protest and all you hear are excuses. The time has come for a nation wide strike and a fight. The cops can't taze, beat or arrest all of us.

56. As you say...

Most people haven't felt the pain of depression yet.
Most still can get by with credit cards, food pantries, food stamps, etc.
Not until most of us are hungry, have no money nor credit cards, then will have nationwide strike to fight

33. 'Fix the Debt': How 1%ers Build a Mass Movement for Millionaires

“You meet people, and you’re all trying to work on something together. It’s its own little think-tank."

“The beautiful thing about this is that, when you get a room full of incredibly bright people with compelling ideas together in a room, something good comes of that.”

“We would lose people if we got more specific about our goals. We’d rather try to influence the overall broad parameters of what happens.”

Quick: Which loosely organized, quasi-ideological faction came up with those lofty expressions of idealism?

If you guessed Occupy Wall Street, you were wrong. They came from recent interviews with top-level members of Fix the Debt, the high-minded confab of business elites that is pushing for bipartisan deficit reduction ahead of the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

The Campaign to Fix the Debt, as it is properly known, is a four-month-old effort led by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the bipartisan duo who unsuccessfully tried to push a deficit-reduction scheme through Congress in 2010. With a reported $43 million war chest and the support of Peter G. Peterson, the Blackstone billionaire and leader of the deficit-scold movement, the group has been waging a nationwide media campaign meant to encourage President Obama and House Republicans to work together to avoid the expiration of the Bush income tax cuts and get long-term spending under control.

34. India's GDP growth languishes, headed for decade low

(Reuters) - India's economy extended its long slump in the last quarter, with lower-than-expected growth keeping it on track for its worst year in a decade and underscoring the urgency of politically difficult reforms to spur a revival.

The economy grew 5.3 percent from a year earlier in the July-September period, provisional gross domestic product (GDP) data showed on Friday, below the 5.5 percent posted for the three months ending in June.

"It is essential that the reform agenda is carried forward with vigor and that the recently announced measures are implemented," leading business chamber FICCI said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's chief economic advisor forecast full-year growth of between 5.5 and 6 percent, which would be the slowest since 2002/3.

35. German lawmakers approve Greek bailout despite qualms

(Reuters) - German lawmakers approved the latest bailout for Greece on Friday by a large majority despite growing unease about the cost to taxpayers less than a year before federal elections.

The outcome of the vote in the lower house was never in doubt but it was a test of Angela Merkel's authority over her center-right coalition. She did not manage to draw an absolute majority from her own ranks after 23 of her lawmakers rebelled.

But with the main opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens voting in favor with most of Merkel's bloc, the revolt had only symbolic value. Of 584 deputies present in the chamber, 473 voted for the bailout and 100 voted against.

The parliamentary floor leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats, Michael Grosse-Broemer, said he was happy with the result of the vote, adding: "Greece must now continue its efforts to reduce its debts and carry out structural reforms."

36. Superstorm Sandy hits consumer spending, income

(Reuters) - Consumer spending fell in October for the first time in five months as superstorm Sandy choked off car sales, suggesting slower economic growth in the fourth quarter.

The Commerce Department said on Friday consumer spending fell 0.2 percent after a 0.8 percent increase in September. It said Sandy had impacted on income growth last month, but it had made adjustments to wages for storm-related work interruptions.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, would be flat last month. While the storm slammed the brakes on automobile purchases, the drop in overall spending was in part a reflection of weak economic fundamentals.

"The report reinforces the fact that U.S. growth in Q4 would be weak," said Joe Manimbo, senior market analyst at Western Union Business Solutions in Washington.

(Reuters) - China's plan to board and search ships that illegally enter what it considers its territory in the disputed South China Sea could spark naval clashes and hurt the region's economy, Southeast Asia's top diplomat warned on Friday.

Seeking to ease alarm over the issue, China said it attached "great importance" to freedom of navigation in waters that have some of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

New rules that take effect on January 1 will allow police in the southern Chinese province of Hainan to board and seize control of foreign ships which "illegally enter" Chinese waters, the official China Daily said on Thursday.

Surin Pitsuwan, secretary-general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), said the Chinese plan was a "very serious turn of events".

38. Swiss fear role as haven for secretive resource traders will cost the country

There are no oil rigs on Lake Geneva but each year enough oil to meet Swiss needs 75 times over is traded electronically in the nondescript offices that hug the shore of the largest lake in the Alps.

There aren't any coffee plantations in Switzerland either, but more than 60% of the world's coffee beans pass – electronically – through the country. And it has some of the finest pastures in western Europe, but only enough to grow a tiny fraction of the 80m tonnes of grains and oil seeds that are bought and sold by its traders every year.

The traders behind these deals make the country SFr20bn (£13bn) a year – more than the GDP of Zambia – but the locals are beginning to ask if the easy money is really worth it.

Switzerland's famously low taxes and light regulation have transformed the country into the world's leading wheeler-dealer in everything from oil, copper and zinc to coffee, sugar, wheat and the other staples of daily life.